Reliability

For the past several decades, there were legitimate questions surrounding the ability of renewables to scale up and meet a substantial amount of our energy needs. But as the technology improved, output increased and generation became more reliable. Renewables are now being deployed at a rate that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

16.73% of U.S. electricity generation capacity now comes from renewable sources, and renewables were responsible for nearly half of the generation capacity added to the U.S. grid last year.1

Both Washington and Oregon get over 75% of their electricity from clean energy, most of it from hydropower.

The uptick in renewable energy deployment is thanks in some part to the rise of utility-scale installations. Large-scale wind farms have popped up across the country, including the world’s largest onshore wind farm, a 1.3 GW installation in California.4

Improvements in grid management and the increasing cost-effectiveness of electricity storage are two of the biggest reasons for the increased reliability of renewables, and those trends show no sign of slowing down.

Back in May, Tesla turned heads when it announced its plans for a new battery product, which would allow homes and large-scale commercial operations to store energy from solar panels or serve as a bac...

After oil prices hit a record high in July 2008, the tiny Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands was forced to declare an economic emergency since around 90 percent of its energy needs were met by imp...

The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, released last week, requires the country to use a lot more renewable energy by the year 2030 — and a lot less coal. And right on time, two new reports publ...

The Obama administration’s new Clean Power Plan, released Monday, is being heralded as a “game-changer.” In fact, a better description is that it’s trying to cement changes already occurring in how we...

Hillary Clinton pledged Sunday that as president she would put the United States on a path toward generating enough renewable energy to power every home in the country by 2027 - ten years after she wo...

When a storm like the one that struck Fort Wayne on June 27 disrupts service to our customers, Indiana Michigan Power’s work is quite visible. Bucket trucks were mobilized throughout the city as I&M m...

In the two years since we outlined how smarter transmission policy could accelerate and reduce clean energy costs in America’s Power Plan, evidence continues to mount that robust high-voltage transmis...

The growth of renewable energy outpaced that of fossil fuels in the electricity sector last year, with a record 135 gigawatts of capacity added from wind, solar, hydropower and other natural sources, ...

It is technically and economically feasible to run the US economy entirely on renewable energy, and to do so by 2050. That is the conclusion of a new study in the journal Energy & Environmental Scienc...

Sonoma Clean Power, the year-old public agency, is rolling out service Monday to three additional cities and in doing so is set to become the main electricity supplier within Sonoma County, dislodging...

A quarter of the nation’s electricity would still come from coal in 2030, so it’s hard to view the Obama administration’s proposed Clean Power Plan as the wholesale remaking of the U.S. power sector t...

The power sector is watching Hawaii closely because it is the one state where the economics of rooftop solar can beat the utility grid on price alone. That's because electricity prices in Hawaii are t...

Texas is a wind energy juggernaut. So why would any lawmaker be so shortsighted as to kill a forward-looking state energy policy that has made Texas the nation’s wind energy epicenter?Yet, state Sen. ...

With more than 8,000 companies operating nationwide, solar energy has become one of the fastest-growing industries in America — thanks, in large part, to remarkable growth on both the West and East co...

Ethanol had a nearly $5 billion impact on Nebraska’s economy last year, according to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln report released Tuesday.During the industry’s infancy in 1985, Nebraska’s ethanol ...

California’s power grid could handle taking 100 percent of its supply from renewables such as wind and solar, and meeting the goal for half that amount will be no problem, the state’s chief energy reg...

Sitting in a control center that helps ensure uninterrupted power for 82 million Germans, Gunter Scheibner is proving that renewable energy from the sun and wind can be just as reliable as fossil fuel...

The gaggle of workers in Montana’s Carbon County hacking at the barely thawed ground in late December were on a mission: Secure Mud Springs Wind Ranch’s eligibility for a green-energy incentive.Why we...

How can high levels of renewable energy be integrated when wind and solar resources are variable? First of all, it’s important to remember that wind and solar are not the only renewables out there. Hi...

A new Gallup poll released at the end of March shows that Americans are decreasing their interest in nuclear energy, while showing an increasing desire for renewable energies such as solar and wind en...

At the recent North American Leaders’ Summit, President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto pledged that North America will collectively genera...

Distributed power generation, for both residential and commercial use, has been in vogue for some time now. But recently, a number of large companies – including tech giants Google, Amazon, and Apple ...

The solar boom shows no signs of slowing down. According to SEIA, the last quarter was the best one ever for the U.S. residential solar sector. The U.S. added 1.3 GW of solar energy, and solar made up...